Nice one. Can you build the ratinglist highlight into that too? or do they need to remiain separate?

On another note, I've just broken into the top250 on croco, which is an achievement for me.
I know i's nothing compared to ronaldx/drsteve who've cracked the top 100, let alone Kiwijam/DavidMcN/detuned who are about to break top 50!

Congratulations to our winners, particularly to James on regaining the championship! Three champions in three weeks, and the week's best times came from another extremely strong contender still - the first Brit to 3rd kyu, no less, which must surely merit a proudly copper-coloured belt. I was relegated; off to the back of the list I go.

By way of investigating possible tie-breakers, here are some stats about players' ratings before and (provisionally) after the week, along with estimated performances over the week to make the difference from before to after:

RELEGATION MATCH
PuzzleScot vs. afcwarren
Winner survives and gets a #2 contender match next week, loser relegated from the ladder and replaced by whoever's at the front of the waiting list.

Waiting list: rodders, erika, dickoon

Matches are to be played over Monday 26th September to Friday 30th September, with possible extra time on Saturday 1st October if required.

As ever, if you know in advance that you won't be able to take part on any particular weekday, please speak up as far in advance as you can and book yourself one or two bye days. If anybody else wants to join the waiting list, please let me know.

Unrelatedly, if anyone has downloaded the croco-puzzle scoring spreadsheet that I uploaded and found that the macro won't work for them, try renaming it from croco-ladder3.xls to croco-ladder2.xls, reopening it and trying the macro again. You probably figured that out already, though; well, it wouldn't do for there not to be a puzzle in there...

dickoon wrote:Your thoughts about whether weekly rating change or estimated weekly performance ratings might be a better tie-breaker still would be welcome.

The overall weekly performance rating will usually be very closely related to overall rating, so biased towards the better players.
Whereas the weekly increase is more likely to come from the lower rated players.
I think that if a lower ranked player achieves a draw, they deserve to have the advantage in a tie, so a very simple 3rd option would simply be that the person who starts (or ends?) the week on an overall lower rating gets the judges vote.

I do have to say that I find I'm meeting exactly the same opponents time after time here, and would urgently request an overhaul asap, preferably to the 3-way match system.

PuzzleScot wrote:
I think that if a lower ranked player achieves a draw, they deserve to have the advantage in a tie, so a very simple 3rd option would simply be that the person who starts (or ends?) the week on an overall lower rating gets the judges vote.

I do have to say that I find I'm meeting exactly the same opponents time after time here, and would urgently request an overhaul asap, preferably to the 3-way match system.

Re: the first point - that's as good an idea as any - forget overall time, if you're higher rated (at the end of the week), you lose if it's a tie. I rather like the simplicity of that. Of course, it doesn't have the same fairness regarding a new good player, who's just started Crocking.

As for the second, I'm finally meeting new people but only due to winning and then defending the title for an even number of weeks. So change might be nice.

Can I ask how the week rating score is calculated? Admittedly I didn't have a particularly stellar week and perhaps 1937 is indeed accurate, but my Tagesrating for instance seems to be hovering just below 2100...

Given the way that your daily rating changes based on the result of your performance at a single puzzle, I reckon that your performance over the week can be approximated by old rating + (change in rating / (60/#days played) ).

This won't be completely accurate as the performance in the most recent days' puzzles will be more heavily reflected in your rating than the performance in puzzles from days earlier in the week, but - unless someone can convince me otherwise - I think it's an acceptably reliable approximation, no matter how high or how low the old rating figure was. Tagesrating is a rolling average of the last 30 days' performances (not sure off-hand whether that's 30 calendar days or the most recent 30 days with croco-puzzle activity) so it may well be the case that the daily ratings that are being brought into the 30-day rolling average are similar to those that are expiring from 30 days ago.

If people like the "lower rating at the start of the week breaks ties" tie-breaker then I'm happy to use it, though in general I think I'd prefer even stronger agreement still from those players who stand to be disadvantaged by its adoption, noting that every voice so far has been broadly favourable.

I"m almost 100% sure (since I can track days I am replacing a good versus bad score) that the Tagesrating is for the last 30 puzzles/15 days. So it functions as a performance level for the last two weeks. I would love to see a Tagesrating leaderboard, since it takes way too long to actually accumulate your appropriate rank, or at least a way to display a few solvers graphs together for this function.

It strikes me that all of this talk about arithmetic mean and geometric mean would be trivially resolved if you could just access directly the "score" (0 to 3000) for the full set of puzzles, with the average of this certainly showing the better performance of the week (and also relative change in overall rankings). So in the absence of this data, working off the overall ranking change in the week with an approximate formula strikes me, as an outsider, as the best choice.

Congratulations to our winners, particularly to Steve on regaining the championship! A third successive championship change in as many weeks, and another strong challenger in the next championship match to follow. Commiserations to afcwarren, who is relegated from the ladder. Thanks for playing, Warren; you're most welcome to rejoin any time, and unless you say otherwise I'll put you on the waiting list to join again.

By way of investigating possible tie-breakers, here are some stats about players' ratings before and (provisionally) after the week, along with estimated performances over the week to make the difference from before to after:

Your thoughts about whether weekly rating change or estimated weekly performance ratings might be a better tie-breaker still would be welcome. Fingers crossed, I hope to get the chance to produce a three-way match spreadsheet this weekend as well and try rerunning things through that, too.

RELEGATION MATCH
puzzlemad vs. rodders
Winner survives and gets a #2 contender match next week, loser relegated from the ladder and replaced by whoever's at the front of the waiting list.

Waiting list: erika, dickoon, afcwarren

Matches are to be played over Monday 3rd October to Friday 7th October, with possible extra time on Saturday 8th October if required.

As ever, if you know in advance that you won't be able to take part on any particular weekday, please speak up as far in advance as you can and book yourself one or two bye days. If anybody else wants to join the waiting list, please let me know.

Unrelatedly, if anyone has downloaded the croco-puzzle scoring spreadsheet that I uploaded and found that the macro won't work for them, try renaming it from croco-ladder3.xls to croco-ladder2.xls, reopening it and trying the macro again. You probably figured that out already, though; well, it wouldn't do for there not to be a puzzle in there...

Your thoughts about whether weekly rating change, estimated weekly performance ratings or just "lower rating at the start of the week breaks ties" might be a better tie-breaker still would be welcome. Fingers crossed, I hope to get the chance to produce a three-way match spreadsheet this weekend as well and try rerunning things through that, too.

Apologies for late notice but can I please book this Friday and next Monday (if I am still on the ladder) as bye days please? I will also be unavailable on Saturday/Sunday if this week's match were to go to a tie-break.

rodders wrote:Apologies for late notice but can I please book this Friday and next Monday (if I am still on the ladder) as bye days please? I will also be unavailable on Saturday/Sunday if this week's match were to go to a tie-break.

You've got 'em! I'll treat your requests as being for Friday and Saturday this week, so if the match is 4-4 after Thursday then we'll go straight to total time, while we're still using it.

Congratulations to our winners, particularly to Ronald on winning the championship! A fourth successive championship change in as many weeks, as if the title were a potato too hot to handle, and Ronald has won the crown after several very close misses. (On a technicality, the last I heard, he's still drifting through the rankings prior to dropping out of the ladder all together; wonder if you're glad that I let you continue to drift, Ronald?) At the other end of the table, Roderick's bye requests takes effect; commiserations to puzzlemad, who is relegated from the ladder. Thanks for playing, Liane; you're most welcome to rejoin any time, and unless you say otherwise I'll put you on the waiting list to join again.

By way of investigating possible tie-breakers, here are some stats about players' ratings before and (provisionally) after the week, along with estimated performances over the week to make the difference from before to after:

Your thoughts about whether weekly rating change or estimated weekly performance ratings might be a better tie-breaker still would be welcome. (For instance, this week, either tie-breaker would have made the puzzlemad-rodders match turn out differently.) Fingers crossed, I really do hope to get the chance to produce a three-way match spreadsheet this weekend as well and try rerunning things through that, too.

RELEGATION MATCH
PuzzleScot vs. erika
Winner survives and gets a #2 contender match next week, loser relegated from the ladder and replaced by whoever's at the front of the waiting list.

Waiting list: dickoon, afcwarren, puzzlemad

Matches are to be played over Monday 10th October to Friday 14th October, with possible extra time on Saturday 15th October if required.

As ever, if you know in advance that you won't be able to take part on any particular weekday, please speak up as far in advance as you can and book yourself one or two bye days. If anybody else wants to join the waiting list, please let me know.

Unrelatedly, if anyone has downloaded the croco-puzzle scoring spreadsheet that I uploaded and found that the macro won't work for them, try renaming it from croco-ladder3.xls to croco-ladder2.xls, reopening it and trying the macro again. You probably figured that out already, though; well, it wouldn't do for there not to be a puzzle in there...

Your thoughts about whether weekly rating change, estimated weekly performance ratings or just "lower rating at the start of the week breaks ties" might be a better tie-breaker still would be welcome, especially with last week's results in mind - regardless of who they would favour in practice on this occasion.

Congratulations to our winners, particularly to James on regaining the championship! A fifth successive championship change in as many weeks. (Congratulations to Ronald on the burly effort to defeat that baleful Laser in the end.) Commiserations to erika, who is relegated from the ladder. Thanks for playing, Thomas; you're most welcome to rejoin any time, and unless you say otherwise I'll put you on the waiting list to join again.

By way of investigating possible tie-breakers, here are some stats about players' ratings before and (provisionally) after the week, along with estimated performances over the week to make the difference from before to after:

RELEGATION MATCH
rodders vs. dickoon
Winner survives and gets a #2 contender match next week, loser relegated from the ladder and replaced by whoever's at the front of the waiting list.

Waiting list: afcwarren, puzzlemad, erika

Matches are to be played over Monday 17th October to Friday 21st October, with possible extra time on Saturday 22nd October if required.

As ever, if you know in advance that you won't be able to take part on any particular weekday, please speak up as far in advance as you can and book yourself one or two bye days. If anybody else wants to join the waiting list, please let me know.

Important: as the WSC and WPC are coming up soon, it's probably time for the croco-puzzle ladder to take a break, even though many of the ladder participants aren't actually going to be away. Provisionally, I intend to run this week of the ladder, then the thirty-first week, then take a break. However, if Tom and Alan both request it (and private message is fine if they don't want to say in public) then we'll make this the last week before we break.

dickoon wrote:Provisionally, I intend to run this week of the ladder, then the thirty-first week, then take a break. However, if Tom and Alan both request it (and private message is fine if they don't want to say in public) then we'll make this the last week before we break.

I think Tom, and Liane and myself would be happy for the daily puzzle to continue as normal. Although clearly(?) the actual contest week will be potentially tricky.

For as long as I'm actually playing croco puzzle, I have no objections to being included in the ladder!

A quick comment re the tie breaker this time round. It struck me as being very unfortunate that anything was decided using *THAT* lasers puzzle because I don't think solving that puzzle had much to do with puzzling skill other than being able to very carefully organise several rounds of trial and error. It took me a good hour to finish off on Saturday afternoon, after giving up on it coming back late Friday night, and it seems judging by ronald's time on it he did something similar. I'm not sure there's anything anyone can do to legislate for such beasts, but I'm not the only one unhappy with the puzzle.

Basically, it does a check of the croco site to see if any new scores have been posted by players in this contest, then shows you how you are doing compared to anyone else. I wrote it for fun, as a programming challenge, but if anyone finds it useful, all the better.

I made it so you could go back and see how you/others did in previous weeks (since Jan2011) also.
All the data is stored in databases, so if there's any other representation of the data you'd like to see, just let me know.